Research coming under pressure

It’s a scene the Montreal neuroscience doctoral student has often witnessed: the head of his research lab pacing the halls, barking out orders to students already working at least 60 hours a week for scant pay, warning them that all of their careers and futures depend on the research being done right, on getting the results required to publish.

McGill neuroscience professor and researcher Dan Guitton, centre, of the Montreal Neurological Institute talks about findings on stimuli for studies of the brain’s visual system with PhD students Sujaya Neupane, right, and Kate Rath-Wilson at the institute in Montreal.John Kenney / The Gazette

MONTREAL – It’s a scene the Montreal neuroscience doctoral student has often witnessed: the head of his research lab pacing the halls, barking out orders to students already working at least 60 hours a week for scant pay, warning them that all of their careers and futures depend on the research being done right, on getting the results required to publish.

Make or break. Do or die. Publish or perish.

These are challenging times in the world of university research and the landscape is changing rapidly. Funding is scarcer than ever but the quest for research success — results that are published and research that can be commercialized — is greater than ever.

The business of research is an increasing concern of cash-starved Canadian universities, which are spending $40 million a year to operate technology transfer offices in hopes of marketing burgeoning research. Now private companies are getting into the research business, too, with the upstart Quebec company MENODYS poised to bring its first medical technology to market this year.

However, marrying the sometimes tempestuous relationship between science and money is becoming increasingly difficult as university finances shrink and government funding for research wanes.

The conflicting objectives of making discoveries and funding has upped the ante for beleaguered graduate students and post-docs, who face enormous pressure to produce results and sacrifice their lives for the sake of a published paper.

“The industry of science is about achieving a sexy new result,” said Jonathan Mooney, outgoing president of the Post Graduate Students Society of McGill University.

Dan Guitton, a McGill neuroscience professor and researcher, is adamant that it is illusory to expect important scientific discoveries to emerge from university-industry partnerships. The “history of science,” he says, shows us the contrary: profound groundbreaking discoveries mostly emerge as unexpected observations from curiosity-driven research.

“Having industry partners decide what research they want is very unlikely to generate great discoveries,” said Guitton. “This is only killing universities.”But others see it differently. Guy Breton, the rector of the Université de Montréal, believes universities here must strengthen their ties with business, as other competitive countries like China and Brazil have done. And to those who worry that partnerships between business and scientists are worrisome, or threaten to impede good science, he says: “That’s a medieval reaction. If we want to survive, society needs innovation. Not all research should be applied, but we should facilitate it when we can. It doesn’t mean we are prostituting ourselves.”

He says it may look like research is bringing in all kinds of money to universities, but that money is tied to a specific researcher or project and can’t be used as part of the operating budget. What’s more, Breton said, is that the grants don’t cover the indirect costs of research for things like equipment and maintenance, which come to 50 per cent of every dollar spent on research.

So a university like his, which brings in roughly $500 million a year for research, then has to spend $250 million to support that research. He says about half that cost is covered by provincial and federal programs, but research still ends up costing universities a lot of money.

“In Quebec, the universities with the largest debt — UdeM, McGill and Université Laval — are the ones with largest research budgets,” he said. “I believe it’s an example of the cost of maintaining that research.”

While universities bemoan the expense of research, the researchers themselves are devastated by the shrinking financial resources available to them. In life sciences, for example, the success rate for applicants to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has dropped to 16 per cent from 21 per cent in 2006. That means 84 per cent of applicants are rejected.

“The success rate is abysmally low,” said Guitton. “Many excellent researchers, not enough money to fund them.” The result, he says, is that the differences in evaluation score between a successful excellent grant application and an excellent one that is not funded can be 0.01 out of 5.00.

“CIHR cannot evaluate a grant proposal to this level of accuracy. The situation has resulted in a system that selects projects by what is effectively a lottery system. It has become fiercely competitive and researchers are crying for help.”

RESEARCH TIED TO GRANT MONEY

Research is not simply about testing hypotheses anymore — it is about getting published and bringing in grant money and trying to come up with marketable results, most of which is required to achieve researchers’ ultimate goal of becoming a tenured professor.

And the results have to be positive in order to publish, so if you didn’t find an effect from the experiment — which is often the result — you’ve got a problem. And it’s even better if you have some scintillating data that will bring in more grant money or attract an industry partner.

The problem, says McGill University PhD candidate and neuroscience researcher Emily Coffey, is that “in order to get results that will allow you to get a good publication and therefore have some chances for post-doc funding and an academic future, you have to take risks and do research that is not guaranteed to work.”

Therefore, what happens in the lab can go one of two ways for a graduate student, she said: You may have a paper published in Nature and be propelled to academic stardom with benefits like guaranteed “juicy” post-doc funding … or you may be nowhere, with no results and with good reason to think you no longer have a viable career as a researcher.

It’s no wonder that both researchers and graduate students describe the atmosphere in Montreal’s hundreds of research labs as pressure cookers, with escalating mental illness and stress issues among the harried students and post-docs staffing the labs, and increasing incidents of misconduct in published papers.

“With success rates for getting grants declining, the lab has to spend more time focusing on grants than on research,” says one PhD student working in a McGill University neuroscience lab. “Grants are what give you the money to do science. If you don’t have grants, you can’t do research. What has happened is that people spend more time writing grants or doing research to make a good grant proposal than using the grants to do research.”

Several researchers who spoke to The Gazette did so on the condition their name was not published because they fear reprisals.

BRINGING IN THE BUCKS

And there is a lot of money involved. The University of Toronto last year became the first university in the country to hit the $1 billion mark in annual research income. The Université de Montréal, with $526 million, and McGill, with $483 million, are also leading research universities.

Research Infosource Inc., which tracks research in Canada, showed that a record 19 universities across the country made it into the $100-million club last year.

However, there is far from an endless supply of funding for research. Canada’s three main granting councils — the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the CIHR and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) — have seen their budgets shrink, in real dollars, in recent years, and all of their success rates have dropped. That means far more researchers and research projects are rejected, according to the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT).

“This puts a lot of people’s careers in jeopardy and some can’t keep their scholarly work going,” said Jim Turk, outgoing executive director of the CAUT. “The dropping success rates serve as a real warning sign of danger.”

NSERC, however, paints a different picture from the CAUT. It says its budget has increased by $250 million over the past decade and the 2014 budget, in particular, showed the federal government’s commitment to science and technology with its creation of the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, an investment of $1.5 billion over the next decade to support the global competitiveness of Canadian post-secondary research. It also boosted funding to the granting councils by $46 million per year, including an additional $15 million per year to NSERC.

“This increase represents the largest increase to the granting councils in a decade,” said Martin Leroux, a media and public affairs officer for NSERC.

Turk, however, said the legacy program gives large amounts to a few lucky recipients when the money could be more wisely spread out among many researchers doing important work. He also worries that funding for basic science research has been dropping, while funding for programs that promote targeted research with industry has been climbing.

BALANCE IN RESEARCH

Research Infosource CEO Ron Freedman says university research linked to industry represents only about 14 per cent of all academic research, so he doesn’t understand what the concern is.

“We have a very excellent balance in Canada between curiosity and mission research,” Freedman said, noting that it varies among the different granting agencies but that upwards of 50 to 60 per cent is for basic research. “People have been debating the issue of basic research versus applied research for decades, but the fact is you never know where important discoveries are going to come from, so I don’t think it’s a really relevant discussion.”

Conversely, he has heard grumblings recently that Canada spends too much on basic research and often gets nothing from it, that research is needed that can “deliver real world health services.”

Basic research is driven by curiosity and a desire to expand our knowledge, whereas applied research answers a specific question that has direct applications in the world.

CONCERNS OVER TAMPERING

The money concerns in research are very tied to the publishing concerns — because publishing can lead to grant money — and that has led to growing worries about researchers tampering with scientific evidence to get the results they want (or need) to get into high-calibre science journals.One of the most notorious cases in recent memory in Montreal concerned the Montreal Heart Institute’s firing of an award-winning cardiac researcher over alleged abnormalities in his research work in 2011.

Zhiguo Wang’s work was investigated by the hospital after he withdrew two articles published in scientific journals. He had been granted several million dollars by the CIHR and the Canadian Diabetes Association to carry out his studies, but the hospital questioned how images used in two studies were manipulated.

While fudged data is still a relatively minor problem in the scientific world, it’s also a growing phenomenon. Ivan Oransky is a medical journalist who runs a blog called Retraction Watch, where he and his partner document all of the retractions put out by scientific journals (they have created a kind of who’s who of questionable science) — and he says the rate of retractions has been growing steadily since 2001.

“There were ten times as many retractions in 2010 as 2001 (900 per cent more), but only 45 per cent more papers published,” Oransky said in an interview. “The retractions seem to be outstripping the growth in papers.” Part of this, he believes, could be attributed to better software to detect plagiarism and the availability of papers electronically.

But he can’t discount the pressure in academia.

“We overemphasize the importance of published papers. Tenure, grants, promotions, patents — every decision in science is based on publishing,” he said. “It gives perverse incentives to publish more, maybe to rush the work or cut corners.”

McGill’s Coffey said the problem wouldn’t exist if negative findings could be published, but that isn’t usually the case (although one lone journal, the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine, has recently bucked that trend).

Coffey cites the example of a researcher who was recently denied grant money because she did not have enough high-impact journal publications. “At 31, she was facing years of poorly paid, temporary post-doc work on other people’s projects, with virtually no academic freedom,” explained Coffey, who laments the fact that “science lost a great mind.”

With careers at stake, it’s no wonder that cases of misconduct in publishing have been escalating.

MISTAKES OR MISCONDUCT?

A study done about a year and a half ago by Arturo Casadevall, a professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, shows that misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications — not errors, as had been previously believed.

His study showed that of 2,047 biomedical and life-sciences research articles that were retracted, only 21 per cent were because of an error. More than 67 per cent of the retractions were attributed to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud, duplicate publication and plagiarism.

“This is a time of high stress for many in science with scarce funding, which in turn heightens competition and pressure to produce results,” Casadevall said in an email. “In this environment, some may be tempted to cheat by fudging data, but I believe that the overwhelming majority of scientists are honest and try to do the best science with whatever resources they have available.” While he doesn’t believe the study has prompted changes in the system, he does believe it has increased awareness of the problem.

Rosie Goldstein, vice-principal of research and international relations for McGill, said the university has strong policies and practices in place to ensure research stays honest.

“Researchers must ensure that their work is informed by the principles of honesty, integrity, trust, accountability and collegiality, and that it meets high scientific and ethical standards,” she said.

She also said McGill has been successful at both advancing basic science and successfully translating research results to the wider community.“McGill is one of the highest-ranking research-intensive universities in North America,” Goldstein said, adding that research is absolutely essential to McGill’s mission. “Research in all disciplines is necessary to address the most pressing and complex challenges facing our society in the 21st century.”

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